Status of Emdebian Grip.

As of July 2014, updates to the Emdebian distributions ceased. There
will be no further updates and no further stable releases. The last
release of Emdebian Grip is 3.1, based on Debian GNU/Linux Wheezy 7.1

Grip is a light grip on Debian Squeeze (the codename of the Debian
6.0 release). Small amounts of squeeze, no functional changes and the
highest level of functional compatibility with Debian Squeeze and
subsequent releases.
Includes support for building custom packages on an Emdebian
installation as well as the ability to mix and match Emdebian and
Debian packages with minimal effort.

Emdebian Grip 3.1 is the current stable release based on Debian 7.1 "wheezy".

Size comparisons

A basic multistrap of Emdebian Grip (sid-grip)
came out at 56Mb installed, not compressed - this includes apt but not much else.

A basic multistrap of Debian (sid) comes
out at 90Mb installed, not compressed - same package list as Emdebian.

A basic debootstrap
of Debian (sid) comes out at 269Mb installed, not compressed. There are a
number reasons for this:

All downloaded packages remain inside the chroot when using
debootstrap. Using apt-get clean reduces the size of the chroot to
208Mb.

More packages are installed - 136 using debootstrap compared to 80
using multistrap. Adding the majority of those packages increases the
Emdebian chroot to 121Mb.

Upgrading a Debian debootstrap chroot to Emdebian Grip
generally frees up over 40Mb during the upgrade, reducing the 208Mb
to 160Mb after running apt-get clean.

To see the size of a prospective system, use multistrap
on your desktop (for the desktop architecture) and list some of the top
level packages in the multistrap file. Then you can chroot into the
system and see if everything you wanted is installed, then tweak
the package list, before getting an accurate size. Remember to
run apt-get clean after installing new packages.

Integration into Debian

With work on Emdebian Grip ceasing, there will be no integration
of Emdebian Grip into Debian.

The apt sources entries for unstable-grip have stopped
receiving updates and will be dropped. Only the stable release
will be retained, again, without updates. (Security updates were
never explicitly supported by Emdebian Grip.)

The old unstable, wheezy, testing, stable
and sid no longer operate and because the underlying Release files
have been changed to the new names, symbolic links will not work either.

Wheezy (stable) has also been removed - the stable release of Emdebian
Wheezy Grip is wheezy-grip (stable-grip).

Components

Component handling as used in Emdebian Grip 2.0 Squeeze has been
dropped in Emdebian Wheezy Grip 3.0 - all packages are now in main.

Methods

Emdebian Grip unpacked .deb archives from Debian using standard
Debian tools, removed relevant files and repacked the archive. The
effect was to retain the unchanged binaries and maintainer scripts of the
original Debian package but reduce the overall size of the package, the
package meta-data and final installation size of the package.

Emdebian Grip processed any .deb from any architecture on any
architecture. This allowed one machine to generate Emdebian Grip packages
for multiple architectures. Emdebian Grip 2.0 supports: